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Best bet is to try and wait for a Barnes and Nobel coupon. I got a coupon for 50% off any product and I ended up getting it for $250. Then I sent the email to my chef and he was able to use the same coupon that I had used to get his copy as well.

I would love to have that book. It looks full of wonderful information, and I loved cutaways as a kid!

But regarding the recipes failing, his book fails to adjust to a simple fact: Recipes don't work. As in they don't produce food if you do exactly what they say. Maybe sometimes--maybe someone's lucky and it's most of the time. But Recipes are, as Alton Brown put it, in on Food and Cooking, like getting directions to a place. So long as you are always starting at the same place, going to the same places, and all conditions are conducive, you will get there. If you are anywhere else, want to go anywhere else, or something is different, you will have no skills, information, or recourse to get to where you want to go.

As Herbert Simon showed: The human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties. These procedures consist in assuming that he can isolate from the rest of the world a closed system containing a limited number of variables and a limited range of consequences.

Well the food just isn't so rational. It's great information to have for someone who is ready to cook and is ingredient minded, and has a healthy relationship with their food. But doing the 30 hour hamburger not only is not a guarantee to get a better hamburger(IMO it doesn't even sound tasty), but it's not even a guarantee to get that hamburger.

I can't wait to add this to my collection. As far as the recipes go, I usually don't buy a book because of them. Instead, I'm more interested in the techniques, flavor combinations, and history introduced. The main reason for getting any new cookbook for me, is to open my eyes to information I hadn't known, or didn't quite fully understand beforehand.

I can't wait to add this to my collection. As far as the recipes go, I usually don't buy a book because of them. Instead, I'm more interested in the techniques, flavor combinations, and history introduced. The main reason for getting any new cookbook for me, is to open my eyes to information I hadn't known, or didn't quite fully understand beforehand.

I'm of the same mindset. These books are worth every dollar. The wealth of practical, heavily researched info is invaluable to both pros and home cooks. The history, food safety, nutritional myth debunking, and science of water are utterly fascinating reads, and that's just volume one of five! Every time I crack one of the other books to reference whatever(last time it was the ratio of length/width/temp/time in regards to sous-vide proteins), I always stumble across a fascinating nugget of information. These truly are encyclopedias of food.
In regards to the recipes Burke- normally I'd agree, but some of the techniques utilized in these books involve very precise ratios of sensitive ingredients. Too much agar, and your fluid gel is sludge. Don't set your meat glue properly and that tenderloin with duck breast fat cap is a waste of both time and product. I spend most of my time curing meats, and I understand full well the importance of properly measuring all your components. In regards to both food safety(botulism sux), and not wasting days/weeks/months/years finishing a product- only to find you improperly measured one component and it's now completely inedible. Some may claim that all this heavy attention to detail and calculation takes some of the passion out of the process, I highly doubt Leonardo Da Vinci was a dispassionate man. He chose a very calculated scientific approach to his creations.and they are beautiful, and expressive.
I think it's really all about constant learning and refining technique, to better express your passion. *rant over*